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SiFive, a company established by researchers who invented the RISC-V instruction set architecture in the University of California Berkeley several years ago, has this week announced two platforms which could be used to design semi-custom SoCs based on RISC-V cores. SiFive is the world’s first and yet the only company developing chips featuring the RISC-V ISA and it already has initial customers interested in designing SoCs for machine learning, storage, embedded, IoT and wearable applications. SiFive: World’s First Developer of Commercial RISC-V Chips RISC-V is an open-source microprocessor architecture developed by researchers in the Computer Science Division at UC Berkeley and...

Last September, when Arm trotted out the Neoverse V1 design and made it available, the N2 design was not yet available. But as of this announcement, today, it is. Both the Ampere Computing Altra and the Amazon Web Services Graviton2 processors, which are the two production-grade Arm server chips in the market today, are based on N1 cores and platform designs, with various customizations...With the V1 platform, Arm is designing cores and the uncore regions of a hypothetical processor using either 7 nanometer or 5 nanometer processes, presumably either at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp or Samsung Electronics, which have fabs...

Apple just launched its first custom processor for computers. The M1 chip is similar to the A-series processors inside the iPhone and iPad, and it powers just two devices: The late 2020 MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. And yet, Intel is still terrified, having mounted a massive ad campaign in an attempt to convince the world that the M1 MacBooks can’t stand up to Windows 10 laptops running on Intel hardware. The campaign was somewhat half-baked, and has since drawn criticism and ridicule for its missteps. The M1 MacBooks offer formidable performance and excellent battery life, with M1 being built...

Nvidia just made some MASSIVE announcements in terms of ARM-based computers, so they're now joining Apple and AMD in the fight against Intel and their x86-based chips.

At the same time is making specific Cryptocurrency Mining Processors to keep them away from our graphics cards.With the launch of the Nvidia RTX 3060 next week the green team is taking steps to reduce the desirability of the new mainstream GPU for cryptocurrency mining. Nvidia sees this as "an important step to help ensure GeForce GPUs end up in the hands of gamers," so says Matt Wuebbling in a blog post published today on Nvidia's site. There has once more been a huge rise in interest around cryptocurrency mining, with the meteoric rise and rise of Bitcoin. That's not...

Going for Broke Apple's Decision to Use Intel Processors Is Nothing Less Than an Attempt to Dethrone Microsoft. Really. By Robert X. CringelyThe crowd this week in San Francisco at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference seemed mildly excited by the prospect of its favorite computer company turning to Intel processors. The CEO of Adobe asked why it had taken Apple so long to make the switch? Analysts on Wall Street were generally positive, with a couple exceptions. WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON HERE!? Are these people drunk on Flav-r-Ade? Yes. It is the legendary Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field...

We all know all about Windows 10’s most controversial feature, and Microsoft has now confirmed it has struck again… Picked up by the ever-excellent AskWoody, the latest update for Windows 10 (patch KB4482887) has crippled gaming performance on the platform across both Nvidia and AMD GPUs. Microsoft has now confirmed the problem and issued an official warning about the update. “After installing KB4482887, users may notice graphics and mouse performance degradation with desktop gaming when playing certain games (eg: Destiny 2),” explained Microsoft, with the company saying it is working on a fix. Needless to say, users are furious. Woody...

Believe it or not, all these faces are fake. They have been synthesized by Nvidia’s new AI algorithm, a generative adversarial network capable of automagically creating humans, cats, and even cars. The technology works so well that we can expect synthetic image search engines soon — just like Google’s, but generating new fake images on the fly that look real. Yes, you know where that is going — and sure, it can be a lot of fun, but also scary. Check out the video. It truly defies belief: According to Nvidia, its GAN is built around a concept called “style...

Last week, Moor Insights & Strategy analysts Anshel Sag, Chris Wilder, Karl Freund and I attended NVIDIA GTC 2018, what I consider the industry leader’s premier GPU developer conference. If you’re unfamiliar with GTC, I wrote a preview here. As per usual with these events, the main keynote, given by CEO Jensen Huang, was the time to catch the biggest announcements coming out of the conference. More importantly, the event was also an opportunity to meet with NVIDIA developers, customers, press and senior leaders.

The billowing compute and data demands that spurred the oil and gas industry to be the largest commercial users of high-performance computing are now propelling the competitive sector to deploy the latest AI technologies. Beyond the requirement for accurate and speedy seismic and reservoir simulation, oil and gas operations face torrents of sensor, geolocation, weather, drilling and seismic data. Just the sensor data alone from one off-shore rig can accrue to hundreds of terabytes of data annually, but most of this remains unanalyzed, dark data. Why? Because there just isn't enough compute capacity to crunch it all. A collaboration between...

Intel finished 2017 on a high note with revenue that handily topped expectations - especially in its key data center group, according to quarterly financial results issued Thursday afternoon. The company said it expects a $1.3 billion windfall in 2018 from the federal tax overhaul approved last month and said it will give nearly half of it to shareholders through a 10 percent increase in the company's dividend. The news sent Intel's shares up 3.75 percent in after-hours trading, to $47 a share. Intel's stock remains near its highest-point since the dot-com era.

There is a new wave of coders and hackers looking to upend the entire internet, signaling the start of a brand new space race. No, this isn’t an episode of HBO’s Silicon Valley, this is actually happening. Currently, the internet is built by large centralized services including server owners, data managers, cloud providers, search engines, telecommunication companies, and social media websites. And these entities are beginning to expand their reach. Internet security and net neutrality are quickly becoming hot topics as more people become aware of the dangers of centralization. And for good reason. Google, Amazon, and Facebook are racing...

Intel announced on Wednesday it hired the former head of AMD's graphics business and will start a new high-end graphics group inside the company. Raja Koduri will join Intel as chief architect and senior vice president of the newly formed Core and Visual Computing Group, and general manager of a new initiative to drive edge computing solutions. The battle over the red-hot graphics chip market just got more interesting. Raja Koduri Intel announced on Wednesday it hired the former head of AMD's graphics business and will start a new high-performance graphics group inside the company. Raja Koduri was named...

Bugs can be exploited to extract info, potentially insert rootkits Intel today admitted its Management Engine (ME), Server Platform Services (SPS), and Trusted Execution Engine (TXE) are vulnerable to multiple worrying security flaws, based on the findings of external security experts.The firmware-level bugs allow logged-in administrators, and malicious or hijacked high-privilege processes, to run code beneath the operating system to spy on or meddle with the computer completely out of sight of other users and admins. The holes can also be exploited by network administrators, or people masquerading as admins, to remotely infect machines with spyware and invisible rootkits, potentially.Meanwhile,...

Demand for virtual reality is expected to surge in the years ahead. Research firm IDC expects that more than 110 million VR headsets will be sold in 2020, up from 9.6 million headsets in 2016. Investors looking to add exposure to the trend have a number of stocks to choose from, including both NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Facebook (NASDAQ:FB). But while those companies may offer attractive upside, their shares certainly aren't cheap, trading for about 40- and 69-times trailing earnings, respectively. Those investors looking for more of a bargain might consider AMD (NASDAQ: AMD). The computing giant seems likely to play...

Nvidia's Ansel is designed to give you all the tools you need to create artistic in-game screenshots of your favorite scenes. Take control of the camera, change the lighting, add a vignette, or snap a 360-degree image. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed a surprising new addition to the company’s portfolio of graphics technologies. The company founder talked about a new form of artwork that has emerged from the gaming community. Several digital artists have made a name for themselves by capturing breathtaking images of video game scenes. Huang said that some of those artists are able to capture such imagery...

Oculus founder Palmer Luckey has poured water on the idea of his Rift virtual reality headset supporting the Mac by saying that Apple doesn't make any computers powerful enough to run it. "That is up to Apple and if they ever release a good computer we will do it," Luckey tells ShackNews when asked about Mac support. "It just boils down to the fact that Apple doesn’t prioritize high-end GPUs. You can buy a $6,000 Mac Pro with the top of the line AMD FirePro D700, and it still doesn’t match our recommended spec." Apple's high-end Mac Pro computers come...

NVIDIA today unveiled a credit-card sized module that harnesses the power of machine learning to enable a new generation of smart, autonomous machines that can learn. The NVIDIA® Jetsonâ„¢ TX1 module addresses the challenge of creating a new wave of millions of smart devices -- drones that don't just fly by remote control, but navigate their way through a forest for search and rescue; compact security surveillance systems that don't just scan crowds, but identify suspicious activity; and robots that don't just perform tasks, but tailor them to individuals' habits -- by incorporating capabilities such as machine learning, computer vision, navigation...

Nvidia Corp. has recalled about 88,000 of its Shield tablets sold in the U.S. and Canada because the lithium-ion battery can overheat and become a fire hazard. The products recalled are, specifically, eight-inch tablets sold between July 2014 and July 2015 at places such as Amazon.com, BestBuy.com and GameStop. The model numbers, seen are on the left-side edge of the devices, P1761, P1761W and P1761WX. Nvidia didn’t say how many...

As Forbes contributor Gordon Kelly reports, the problem revolves around a conflict between automatic updates and Nvidia graphics card updates using Nvidia’s ‘Nvidia GeForce Experience’—a handy tool for all Nvidia GPU owners. Basically Microsoft has taken control away from users, and made all updates mandatory—including driver updates. This is a decision meant to increase security and stability across the PC user base, but it comes at a cost. Users are reporting problems with multi-monitor setups, dual-card configurations (SLI) and PCs not booting properly, setting off Windows 10 emergency recovery mode. More issues are likely to arise. In other words, for...